The plane comes in high and circles down, the way all planes do at the Baghdad airport these days. Two giant armor-plated GMC SUVs meet him, manned by American soldiers with M4 rifles and helmets with earphones. They drive fast past the checkpoints, the city invisible behind the high barriers that line the road. It is mid-October. Ramsey Clark has been here many times before. During the Gulf war in 1991, while American bombs were falling, he made a mad two-thousand-mile dash across this country in a rented car, visiting hospitals and bomb craters. He saw a twelve-year-old girl get her leg amputated without anesthetic, four grown men holding her down. Earlier he roamed the battlefields of World War II as a teenage courier and visited war zones in Hanoi, Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, Rwanda. At times like this, the memories come roaring back.

They get to the Green Zone just after lunch, dropping their bags at a series of little prefab trailers stuck under the looming shards of a bombed-out government building. Each trailer has four narrow beds, two tin closets, and a shower. A half dozen Iraqi lawyers already occupy three of them.

An hour later, they get to the courthouse. It's just like you see it on TV, a puppet theater with journalists in the audience, judges on risers, and the defendants onstage in their railed pen. Clark isn't happy with that arrangement, not for this private meeting. He definitely doesn't want to be sitting in the judge's chair, and he doesn't want the President--that's what he always calls his client, giving him the same deference he'd give any legitimate national leader--sitting "in the dock." He wants a table where they can sit and converse like civilized men.

And as for the video cameras mounted in every corner of the room, thirty-four of them in total, absolutely not.

When the table is ready, the President comes in. He looks tired, but Clark is struck by how he walks, with surprising grace, almost as though he's floating along without a care in the world, delighted to find himself in this particular place with these particular people. The other lawyers give him the Arab embrace, kissing three times on the cheeks, and some give a final kiss to the forehead, a sign of respect usually reserved for a father.

Embracing him, Clark feels his arms. You've lost weight, he says.

Twelve pounds, the President says.

Looks more like twenty, Clark says.

The President treats Clark more as a peer than a lawyer, and they've known each other a long time now, more than ten years. They meet like two diplomats. And since the case is over and all the arguments have been made, there's none of the usual scramble to get a word in, so Clark takes the lead and fills the President in on recent developments like the North Korean nuclear test. People are saying that if Saddam Hussein had the bomb, he wouldn't be in prison now.

The President shrugs. Who knows?

He's not the type to speculate. He likes hard facts, and he likes the long black cigars stuck in his shirt pocket. But when he takes one out and lights it, an American soldier comes over. Please, you can't smoke here.

Once he was the highest law-enforcement officer in the land, the attorney general of the United States of America. His father was a Supreme Court justice and one of President Johnson's oldest friends; Bobby and Jack and Lyndon were members of his social circle. Now Ramsey Clark has written up articles of impeachment against President Bush and organized a "people's trial" of Bush Senior, taking up the defense of Saddam Hussein himself. He has gone about as far outside the mainstream as you can go without going to prison. Judging from the raw spew of the Internet, he could be the single most hated man in America--the "war criminal's best friend," a "Nazi apologist," an "American traitor."

Everyone asks the same question: How did he get from there to here? A few years ago in The New Republic, John B. Judis suggested it was issues with his father, a conservative judge who supervised the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II and hunted communists during the McCarthy era. Another popular theory centers on his supposed guilt for supporting the Johnson administration during the Vietnam War, when he supervised the prosecution of draft dodgers and ordered the arrest of Benjamin Spock. But these theories just shrink Clark down to something small enough to dismiss, evading the true mystery.

How did he really get from there to here? Through a million different versions of this moment, leaving his Greenwich Village apartment with a nylon gym bag for a trip that will last a week, wearing comfortable old shoes and brown twill Levi's that always keep their crease. In the bag, there's a couple of blue permanent-press shirts and a tie and maybe an extra pair of pants, plus legal papers--there are always legal papers.

He's done this so many times before. He knows all the airports and their layouts, that it's sometimes faster to park at terminal 4 and walk to terminal 3--and sometimes even faster to hitch a ride on a U. S. Army plane, like he did after the invasion of Grenada, breaching the restricted zone to demand a meeting with the leader of the coup. "If he's done anything wrong," he said, "he can take his punishment like a man, but he should have a right to a lawyer."

In his conversation, time past mixes with time present. He remembers flying into Washington, D. C., the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the awful sight of the city in flames, and he remembers walking across China during the famine of 1948, when people were dying so fast, the authorities sent carts around every morning to gather the bodies. He jumps from the horrors of the Philippine campaign of 1898 to the charge that his client, the man he is on his way to meet, the man he always calls the President, used poison gas to slaughter thousands of helpless Kurds. You have to remember the context, he says. It was during the war between Iraq and Iran, when both sides were using gas. Although the evidence now seems very heavily against Hussein, with most human-rights groups pinning the blame on Iraq, Clark brings up an op-ed piece in The New York Times by one of the CIA's top Iraq specialists, Stephen Pelletiere, that supports his position.

"Voltaire says history is fiction agreed upon," he says. "I find that unacceptable."

In his nylon bag, Clark carries a copy of a letter that he just sent to each member of the United Nations and hopes to pre-sent to the President in Iraq. It's a plea rich with his signature style, sober legal argument and explosive political charges both expressed in the same mild tone. The Iraqi Special Tribunal was created and financed by the United States and therefore has no legitimacy, he says. Plus the judges are longtime political enemies of the defendant who've shown their bias in statements like "a trial is not necessary, just a hanging." The first case to go forward, the one Clark is working on, centers on a day when Saddam Hussein drove through a town called Dujail. From the shelter of its celebrated orchards, rebels attacked Hussein's convoy and actually managed to hit his car before fleeing into the trees, so Hussein sent his army in to raze the orchards and arrest 399 people. A few years later, after a two-week trial, he signed death warrants for 148 of them.

In early news accounts, this was the reason everyone gave for starting his trials with this case. With Hussein's signature on the warrants, conviction was a slam dunk.

But wait, Clark says. Don't the existence of a trial and signed warrants actually make it more difficult? As usual, his version begins the tangled history. The Dujail incident occurred near the Iranian border during the Iran-Iraq war, when the border was an extremely tense place. Dujail was a stronghold of the rebellious Dawa party, which was allied with Iran to overthrow Saddam Hussein--and it is no accident that both of the prime ministers under the American occupation have been members of the Dawa party. That is the real reason the trials started here, Clark says. It is sheer revenge for the Dawa party. Putting it first is their way of saying they're on top now; they call the shots.

Just look at the way the court has acted, he says. The first judge quit, complaining of political pressure to be tougher. A second judge was kicked off for possible ties to the Baath party. The third judge is a Kurd whose relatives were killed in the gas attacks everyone blames on the President. He not only refused to review the original court records, he wouldn't turn them over to the defense. How can Hussein's lawyers defend the record, he says, if they don't even have the record?

Allegedly, some of those 148 people were also tortured. According to the prosecutor, 50 of them didn't even survive long enough to be executed. Clark skips over that in his letter, though he does acknowledge the dispute over the age of the dead: "Several may have been males under eighteen."

The prosecutor says that one of them may have been as young as eleven.

Clark has answers to all these questions, and questions for all of the answers. But now it's getting late. As the stewards turn off the cabin lights, Clark puts his hearing aids into a small box and leans back. He is going to have a very busy day tomorrow.

His journeys began early. Born of a prominent Texas legal family, grandson of a judge who served on the state supreme court, he grew up with an almost innate sense of justice. "Mother used to say we were the only family that would argue about who got the last biscuit or the last dessert--'You have it! No, you have it!' " his sister remembers. His mother took him along when she dropped off her laundry in the poor black part of town and noticed him taking in the differences, and one day he realized there weren't any Negroes in school. He fell in love with the beautiful story of Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves, then his grandmother pointed out a tree in her backyard with a burn scar left by the Yankees and he discovered that one of his grandfathers once gave some fiercely racist speeches. And sometime around the fourth or fifth grade they discussed the death penalty at school and he had a powerful instinctive reaction--the death penalty wasn't just bad, it was horrible. To take a helpless man and kill him and call it justice? Horrible.

He was fifteen or sixteen when he began to read Dostoyevsky.One passage had a big impact, when a prisoner collapses during a lineup and the Russian general goes over to lift his head up from the ground, a simple act of kindness that sends Dostoyevsky into one of his Christian rhapsodies. What if that single act of kindness had the power to inspire similar acts? What if the transfiguration of the world began in that moment?

But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Ramsey and his friend Bob Huttenback went straight down to the Marine recruiting office. Turned away at the door--they were only thirteen--they went home and spread out maps on their beds and made plans for a trip to Alaska or even a hike across the Kamchatka Peninsula. Four years later, Ramsey enlisted in the Marines at seventeen. In the winter of 1945, the year President Truman named his father attorney general of the United States, he started carrying his military pouch across the devastated cities of Europe. He took coding machines to Moscow and twice took legal papers to the Nuremberg tribunal, where an idealistic generation of military lawyers was honing the concept of war crimes--a subject he found infinitely fascinating.

When he got out of the Marines, he blazed through three college degrees in four years, got married, and even took one summer off for that awful trip to China. For the next decade he practiced law in Dallas and tried to raise his family, getting occasional glimpses of the life to come. One time, a rich Mormon client asked him to help build houses for the poor in Nic-aragua and the Somoza government kept putting up road-blocks until he realized it didn't want better housing for the poor--it would just make them want more. He was inspired by the antiwar writing of Smedley Butler, the most decorated American war hero of the early twentieth century: "I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 19091912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."

But those were just whispers of doubt compared with his struggles at home. Something was wrong with his daughter, Ronda, and the doctors at the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins wanted to give her electric shocks and rides in a gyroscope. The only way he could stand it was to take every test with her. "He was always compassionate," his sister says, "but I think her handicap made him more so. He always says that Ronda has been a lesson in love."

He started at the Justice Department in 1961 as an assistant attorney general, plunging into the historic battle over James Meredith's attempt to become the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi. Late on a Sunday evening in September, with the governor of Mississippi refusing to obey a court order to let Meredith register despite repeated personal phone calls from President Kennedy himself, Clark was monitoring the crisis from the attorney general's office at the Department of Justice, coordinating with Bobby Kennedy. As two hundred federal marshals faced down a mob of angry whites, dozens of gunshots came at them. "They kept asking for permission to fire at the crowd," Clark remembers. "I said, 'For God's sake, don't fire.' "

Two people were killed that night, so Kennedy sent Clark down to keep an eye on Meredith. He stopped by Meredith's dorm room during the first night and the raw hate he saw shocked him--these cute young college girls spitting such ugly words.

One night, Meredith felt he just had to go bowling. "I said, 'You want to go to the white bowling alley?' He said, 'I just want to go bowling.' "

Afterward, he traveled across the South to study integration and came back with a radical proposal for a new omnibus law, an early glimmer of what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But Clark also turned out to be a classic good-government type, stingy with a federal dollar; while clearing a backlog of sixteen thousand cases, he still gave $300,000 a year back to the Treasury and asked Congress to cut his staff and budget. Impressed, President Johnson parked him at a desk right outside the Oval Of-fice with orders to help draft his legislative package, then rewarded him with a promotion to deputy AG.

Within a month, the new deputy AG flew to Selma, Alabama, to supervise the federal force protecting Martin Luther King as he led the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. The FBI had reports of twelve hundred violent racists converging on the area. He remembers the little black kids screaming with excitement when they saw the marchers and having to call Robert McNamara to get an Army surveillance truck moved out of the way. A few months after that, Watts exploded in riots that left thirty-four dead and Clark flew out again, spending an entire month studying what had happened. Editorialists praised him for his "unruffled demeanor" and calming presence.

Two years later, in early March 1967, Johnson made him attorney general. Clark was thirty-nine. Already the people who wrote and talked about him were catching angles on the same oddly elusive character. He was "like a big teddy bear, friendly but vague"; he was "so unpretentious that some mistake his diffidence for disinterest"; he was "the nicest of driven men." They noted his "unusual interest in long-term problems" and his refusal to use his official limo, sometimes even arriving at state occasions on foot. His Achilles' heel, one reporter suggested, was "a tendency to stand on principle when practical men would compromise."

He quickly established himself as the most liberal attorney general in American history. In one of his first official acts, he stopped all federal executions. He refused to build any more prisons, calling them schools for crime. He resisted J. Edgar Hoover's demands for wiretaps. But he was also surprisingly friendly to police officers. He became known for dropping in on police departments all over the country, asking about their problems. He pushed a plan to give local police huge salary boosts plus an extra $300 million a year for recruiting and modernizing the force. He pioneered the concept of federal strike forces against organized crime, indicting as many members of the Mafia during his two years in office as all the nation's investigators did in the previous eleven years combined. He more than doubled the amount of drug seizures and established the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

But his greatest law-enforcement achievement may be the things that didn't happen in the long hot summer of 1968. Clark began preparing early, sponsoring a series of riot-prevention seminars for the nation's police chiefs. He emphasized the need for massive police presence and put a special emphasis on tear gas, hoping to avoid gunfire. He issued formal instructions not to shoot in the case of looting. "Far from being effective, shooting looters divides, angers, embitters, drives to violence," he said. "It creates the very problems its advocates claim it is their purpose to avoid."

April put his theories to the test. After a sniper killed King and riots exploded across the nation, he spent the whole week at the Justice Department, sleeping on a cot and taking calls from mayors and police chiefs around the clock. Deputy attorney general Warren Christopher told The New Yorker that the pressure to use troops against black Americans was so fierce, "the president and the attorney general have had to resist it as a pure act of will."

The good news was that police mostly held their fire. Throughout the nation, with riots in a hundred cities, only thirty-nine people died (compared with forty-three in Detroit alone in 1967). But Americans were fed up, and when the Poor People's March arrived in Washington a few weeks later they were disgusted by how "permissive" Clark was--at one point, he even invited a group of angry protestors into the Justice Department to hear their complaints face-to-face. For many of those who watched the scene on TV, nothing seemed to capture the anarchy in the streets better than the sight of the attorney general of the United States standing silent as an angry Negro shook her fist in his face.

In the following months, Richard Nixon made Clark the red flag of his presidential campaign, the softest of the liberals who were "soft on crime." At the Republican convention Nixon said, "The first thing we're going to do is get a new attorney general."

Clark was in Virginia watching it on TV.

That helped focus things for him, and once Nixon won, his new attorney general, John Mitchell, quickly announced a plan to expand the government's wiretapping activities "not only against national-security cases but against organized crime and other major crimes"--followed by calls for preventive detention and "no knock" police searches and investigations of antiwar groups and attempts to undermine the new Miranda rights and scuttle the desegregation lawsuits, the whole bag of hot-button issues that didn't really affect the crime rate. The way Clark saw it, Nixon was using fear and hatred to manipulate the people, which only made the problems worse.

With all that behind him, still just forty-one years old, Clark set out on his endless journey.

Thirty-seven years later, Clark lands in Rome just after 8:00 A.M. and even though it's two in the morning back in New York, he drops his bag at a hotel and jumps in a cab with an activist named Richard Becker. A stern-looking fellow sporting the ever popular Vladimir Ilyich Lenin look, Becker is a staff writer at a magazine called Socialism and Liberation. They fall into memories of watching the bombs fall on Belgrade and the terrible injustice done to Slobodan Milo_eviÂ¥c when the International Criminal Tribunal put him on trial for genocide.

The cab pulls up to a United Nations building near the Roman Colosseum, where they are attending a convention sponsored by the same Venezuelan leader who just two weeks earlier in New York compared President Bush to Satan. In a large conference room, a series of speakers talk about how globalism is destroying peasant life and how capitalism encourages war. They speak of the inspiring example of the people's government in Oaxaca and the horror of life in African shantytowns and the true Berlin Wall between the haves and the have-nots. Clark seems to agree with much of this, often quoting Martin Luther King's line about the United States being the "greatest purveyor of violence on earth." As he walks around, people smile and call out his name. Ramsey! Someone asks him to join a tribunal with Noam Chomsky and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. A reporter sticks a microphone in his face and asks him to comment on the recent school shooting in Pennsylvania, which gives him a chance to talk about something that really seems to move him--the beautiful way those Amish parents forgave the killer. Remember when the reporter asked the father how he could do that? "God helps," he answered. "God helps."

Clark smiles when he says that, his expression simple and kind, one of those pure American smiles you see on the face of Jimmy Stewart or Mr. Rogers or even John Wayne. Then he shoots across Rome to do an interview with Italy's top talk-show host, a thoughtful man who grills him for nearly an hour on live TV. Answering without hesitation, Clark says he believes in the basic goodness of the people of the United States, a generous people, but they are distracting themselves with video games and TV and the world is bleeding and attention must be paid. The American Revolution was really just a transfer of power from the elite of England to the elite of the United States, and we didn't support the Haitian rebellion in 1791 because they were blacks rebelling against our European allies. The Monroe Doctrine made Latin America our grocery cart and what about the CIA chief who said that one of the CIA's proudest achievements was putting the shah on the throne of Iran? This from a country that fought a war against King George! We spend more on arms than all other countries combined and then push them on the world, fueling one bloody little war after another. We demonize Castro, but he gave Cuba some of the highest reading and math scores in Latin America with the lowest school budgets. And let's face it, Ramsey says, the war on terror really is a war on Islam--Bush lets it slip every once in a while with his lines about crusades and caliphates. But look at Baghdad and imagine the whole world that way.

He speaks in the same calm voice, firm and humane. There's no ego in him, no inner voice that preens and says, I'm right. But in his quiet way, he's relentless.

How did he get here? After Nixon became president, he took a job at a white-shoe law firm and wrote a remarkable book called Crime in America, distilling all he had learned and pondered at the Justice Department. Crime was not that complicated, he said. If you laid out on a map all the high-crime areas, they would be the same areas where you found poverty. Obviously, a capacity for crime develops in degraded environments where decent human values have been corrupted. But we do so little to help. We are guilty of an immense neglect, and the rage of the ghetto is the "ultimate product of our inhumanity."

To a man of Clark's convictions, those were dark years. He felt that the prosecution of the Chicago Seven was a blatant political show trial, the prosecutor denouncing the defendants--a group that included one future venture capitalist and one future state senator--as "obscene haters" and "evil men" who wanted to "stand on the rubble of our destroyed system of government." He defended Rev. Philip Berrigan against conspiracy charges that grew out of a half-baked fantasy of kidnapping Henry Kissinger to put him on trial for war crimes, another shoddy prosecution shamelessly designed to punish resistance to the Vietnam War. He took on the case of a Kent State student who was accused of rioting, an ugly attempt to blame unarmed students for the four lives taken by the National Guard. He took one of the cases to emerge from the Attica prison uprising, when New York governor Nelson Rockefeller's troops killed thirty-nine prisoners and hostages and blamed it all on the prisoners until the evidence showed all the hostages were shot by government bullets. By this time, in Clark's mind, it was all beginning to cohere into a single problem. "Attica reminds us how quickly America resorts to violence and how little we revere life," he wrote. "If we are to begin to make sense with our treatment of offenders, we must recognize our common humanity."

By then he had achieved such stature, the Democrats were seriously considering him as a presidential candidate. But Clark chose that moment to take another huge risk. Ever since the Paris peace talks collapsed in December of 1971, there had been rumors of "carpet bombing" in North Vietnam, of attacks on hospitals and civilians and especially the dykes that held water in the rice paddies that fed the nation. It was all fiercely denied by the Nixon administration. But Clark decided he had to go see for himself.

He knew the consequences. High-ranking officials warned him he could be prosecuted. He went through Moscow, taking rattling Russian planes down through Burma and Laos. Flying into Hanoi, he saw U. S. warplanes riding just off each wing. On the ground, exploring the country alone with a car and driver supplied by the North Vietnamese, he saw "massive destruction" that looked very much like war crimes against civilians, including a bombed hospital and bombed dykes, and though he was careful to tell reporters that there was no way to tell whether the strikes were accidental or deliberate, he couldn't help seeing it as a meaningless technical quibble. "To the people who are getting hit, it doesn't make much difference, does it?"

He came back to a furor. John Mitchell called him a dupe who was "broadcasting Communist propaganda from Hanoi," and his successor at Justice threatened to indict Clark. The Veterans of Foreign Wars called him a "traitorous meddler." The Defense Department accused him of withholding information about American prisoners of war.

But later, the Army admitted that it did bomb that hospital in Hanoi--an accident, so sorry.

To Clark, it was all very much like the fight over civil rights, with the same urge to segregate and demonize and the same impulse to use violence to solve deep underlying problems. That was when he quit his fancy law firm and plunged full-time into human-rights work. Hearing about a coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, he flew down to Santiago and found himself driving through a sudden thunderstorm to the Venezuelan embassy, where twelve hundred Chileans had taken sanctuary after rushing the wall. But over at the U. S. embassy, they hadn't taken in a single person and had even turned away four frightened young Americans--a story told in the movie Missing. Later it came out that the U. S. was behind the whole thing, but for a while there he was out on his lonely limb.

His next project was the Commission of Inquiry on the death of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther who rose to prominence by bringing peace to the Chicago gangs and starting a free-breakfast program. Although the police insisted that Hampton provoked the shoot-out, Clark's "citizen's tribunal" showed that they raided his apartment without lights or a loudspeaker or tear gas and that he was probably drugged in advance. Forensic reports eventually proved that ninety-eight of the ninety-nine bullets came from the police.

Next, Clark ran a suicidal campaign for the Senate. Refusing all contributions higher than a hundred dollars and scorning TV commercials--since reform wasn't possible as long as the government was in the pocket of "big money"--he rented a white Dodge van and traveled around New York State in his Levi's and Hush Puppies, upsetting Jews by calling for a Palestinian homeland and upsetting the Left by supporting arms shipments to Israel. Whatever it took to achieve peace, he said. Both sides called him a hypocrite and his Republican opponent sneered at his "aura of sainthood." Clark lost by 250,000 votes.

He pressed on, joining the effort to help Soviet dissidents and the campaign against the shah, coming back from Iran with tales of torture and repression that everyone ignored. He ran another Senate campaign on an even more suicidal platform he called the "citizen's agenda," calling for national health insurance and a tax on millionaires and a Mideast Development Authority to fight poverty in the Muslim world, another attempt to get to first causes. But he also proposed a "negative income tax" that would rise and fall with the fortunes of the poor, an idea borrowed from Milton Friedman, the ultimate conservative economist.

He lost again. His father died. At the funeral, he gave a revealing eulogy: "He was a doer. He was driven--a driven human being." And so it was that he found himself in Iran on the morning the shah fled, a bitter-cold day when the whole country was on strike and a tank crushed a crowd of people waiting for heating and cooking oil. He remembers walking into the prime minister's office and finding him in the act of taking pictures of the shah off the wall. "We chat for a while, and finally I say, 'Can I use your phone?' He said, 'You'll have to ask him.' "

The prime minister pointed to a man standing to the side and Clark's eyes went to the man's gun.

In the morning he met with the American ambassador, William H. Sullivan, the same man who warned him he'd be prosecuted for going to Hanoi, and Sullivan made a stab at summing it up: I guess the lesson of all of this is that you have to destroy the opposition before it can rise.

Clark thought, Gosh, with an attitude like that, no wonder everything's going to hell.

A year later, when Ayatollah Khomeini was running Iran and militant students took sixty-six hostages at the U. S. embassy, Clark was the only prominent American who had any kind of friendly relationship with the new regime. So President Carter summoned Clark to the White House and asked him to fly to Iran as a special envoy. He even offered him Air Force 2. Clark got as far as Istanbul, but the Iranians wouldn't let him in--as a private citizen, he was welcome, but not as a representative of the Great Satan.

So Clark went back as a private citizen, finding a pretext in a four-day conference on the sins of the United States, where he offered to take the place of the hostages himself.

As usual, he managed to annoy everybody. In Iran, he was denounced as a spy. When he got back to America, Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti threatened him with ten years in jail. And Bob Dole introduced legislation to prosecute him under the Logan Act, which forbids private citizens from attempting personal diplomacy. Even President Carter called for "appropriate punishment." Clark hatred was bipartisan that year.

"We need to understand that our policy toward Iran has violated every value we love," Clark responded. "We supported dictatorship, tyranny, torture, brute force, and absolute obedience to authority." Just for once, couldn't we try the only real solution, starting with a sincere attempt to "express humane sorrow" for the seventy thousand dead under the shah and a congressional investigation into America's sordid history in Iran?

And so it continued. Whenever the U. S. said someone was evil or monstrous, he remembered all the hate piled onto James Meredith and Martin Luther King and Philip Berrigan and Fred Hampton. When the U. S. invaded Grenada in 1983, Clark went in while the country was still under martial law and walked up Richmond Hill on foot and asked to see the coup leader because "he should have a right to a lawyer." He went into Panama right after Operation Just Cause to count bodies and question the justice of invading a foreign country and killing hundreds of innocent people just to arrest one man on drug charges. He took on the PLO as a client because the push to shut down the PLO mission to the UN would only isolate the Palestinians and make their problems fester. By his inner logic, Clark was always chasing the same goal, the simple act of kindness that could transform the world.

But that was also when he began to take on a series of cases that dismayed even his closest supporters. The first was the case of a Nazi war criminal named Karl Linnas. Next came Lyndon LaRouche, one of the great political cranks in American history. Then another Nazi, a retired restaurant manager from the suburbs of New York who admitted shooting, reluctantly, into a group of Jews standing in an open grave. He defended the PLO in the Achille Lauro incident, when terrorists pushed an elderly man in a wheelchair overboard. And the Branch Davidians who survived the federal assault on their compound in Waco, Texas. For the first time in Clark's career, long hostile articles began to appear in liberal publications like The New Republic and The New York Times. He had gone too far, they said, gone downright weird.

Then he flew to Iraq and met with Saddam Hussein.

THE MEETING CAME THROUGH Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Iraq. Clark had met him on a trip to Baghdad in 1985 and kept in touch over the years, getting together whenever Aziz passed through New York. He was a Catholic with a degree in English, the only Christian in Hussein's government. He seemed both intelligent and straightforward, Clark says, with a good sense of humor and a wide breadth of interests. The only thing not to like was his awful cigars, heavy black things from Cuba.

In September 1990, Clark got a call from the Iraqi ambassador. The President asked me to contact you, he said. He wants to know if you would be willing to meet.

This was just a month after Hussein invaded Kuwait, when America was preparing for war. Clark flew out to Iraq. Hussein was very direct with him. I want to get out of Kuwait, he said. I want to do it honorably. I want to avoid war.

pride, Clark says. He seemed to be a thinking person, a person of thought, very different from the impression you got from the media.

There is a history here, too, Clark says. When Abdul Kassem became president of Iraq in 1958, he quickly made peace with the Soviets and started supporting the idea of an Arab oil cartel. Five years later the Americans helped overthrow him. After the Baathists nationalized oil in 1972, the Americans started funneling money to the rebellious Kurds. They betrayed Iraq again during the Iran-Iraq war, promising friendship while secretly selling arms to the Iranians. Then they encouraged Kuwait to provoke a war by manipulating oil prices--and so far seemed to be doing everything they could to avoid a peace settlement. You've got to save your people, Clark told him. Hiroshima happened. Meaning that they could be blasted off the map. Hiroshima happened, he repeated.

Yes, the President said. I know.

The bombing started on January 17, 1991. Two weeks later, Clark set out for the Iraqi border in a rented car, accompanied by a documentary filmmaker named Jon Alpert. Most of the U. S. media had pulled out, so Clark and Al-pert had no idea what they would find. On Al-pert's footage, you see Clark's long, mournful face taking in the burned hulks of trucks and buses and cars. He visits the factory the U. S. bombed twice, saying it manufactured chemicals, and examines a bag of baby formula, studies the rubble that was once houses and shops, listens to a young girl weep as she describes the bomb that burned off her father's lips and nose. "He has no face," she moans. He visits a morgue and sees two blackened bodies and listens to the sad old man who says they were his daughters, and all he can do is press the man's hand and say, "We're very sorry."

At the time, American officials described the bombing as humane and surgical. But in fact it was a slaughter. For forty-two days, U. S. planes ran eighty-eight thousand sorties and dropped eighty million pounds of bombs, more bombs than all the Allies dropped on Europe in World War II. They bombed farms and hospitals, fertilizer plants and water-treatment facilities. They bombed people trying to escape the bombs. They used bulldozers to bury hundreds, perhaps thousands of soldiers alive in their trenches. When it was over, the Iraqi death toll was somewhere around a hundred thousand people and the U. S. had lost three hundred soldiers.

Then the U. S. pushed for sanctions, which grew increasingly harsh over the next decade. Somewhere around 1.5 million people died from bad water or lack of food and medicine, including 500,000 children, according to UNICEF and other human-rights groups. Most Americans seemed to shrug it off, eventually blaming it on Saddam Hussein's corruption of the oil-for-food program, with Hus-sein building palaces as his people starved. But Clark plunged into the cause, returning to Iraq year after year, writing increasingly desperate letters to high officials at the UN: "Your action is essential now. Hundreds of people are dying every day." He also tried Secretary of State Warren Christopher, once his deputy at the Justice Department: "Failure to address this problem promptly will burden the Clinton administration with responsibility for future deaths." He started another citizen's tribunal, charged the first President Bush with war crimes, wrote a big, thick book called The Fire This Time, and packed it with well-documented accounts of terrible human suffering that everyone ignored. By 1998, the head UN-aid official in Iraq had quit his job and said he could no longer administer a program that "satisfies the definition of genocide." But still, somehow, after all that devastation, with the country barely alive, a new American president managed to convince the public that Iraq needed to be attacked again. It pains him, it really does. "How can you attack those people who were suffering so much?"

On several occasions during his tours of Iraq, Clark was summoned to see the President again. In an office in one of the magnificent palaces, attended by a couple of translators, the President would offer him coffee and tea and Cuban cigars and then they would sit and talk for hours. First they discussed the sanctions. "I think it was painful for him to hear what I would have to say," Clark says, "because it was grim--children dying in the hospitals." One time they were talking about the latest peace talks in Israel and Hussein said he thought it was manipulative and wrongheaded to try to exclude Arafat. It was like trying to produce Hamlet without Hamlet, Clark answered, which led to an extended discussion of Shakespeare. But the conversation Clark remembers most vividly began on the topic of rural electrification. Somehow Clark got into a story about how Lyndon Johnson "turned on the lights" in Texas and the intense loyalty and gratitude it sparked in all the farmers and ranchers, and Hussein said he directed Iraq's rural electrification program and he understood exactly how much of a difference it made and how appreciative the people became. That led to a story about how Johnson used to cry when he told stories from his youth about Mexican kids coming into Johnson's classroom without shoes, but then he'd head down to the situation room and cheer right up if he heard the North Vietnamese body count was high. The death of his enemies made his day. At that point, Hussein said something Clark will never forget. "In our culture, we have an expression: 'A prophet is someone who can love at a distance.' "

The bombing started again on March 19, 2003. The next time they met, the President was in an American prison near the Baghdad airport. Clark flew in at 5:00 A.M. and waited outside the prison while the guards set off seven detonations for some kind of seismic superspy purpose, then waited in a big room with a conference table until finally the President came in and embraced him. He was soft-spoken and composed, Clark remembers, and mostly interested in the news Clark brought about his family--his eldest granddaughter had just gotten engaged, his son was going to college in Yemen, his grandson had grown a lot but didn't like his new school.

The next time they met, Saddam had written him a poem.

Preparing the case was a challenge, to say the least. They couldn't investigate because they couldn't leave the Green Zone, which meant they couldn't visit the crime scene. The first night after the trial began, ten men in masks kidnapped one of the defense attorneys. His body turned up the next day.

Two weeks later, three gunmen attacked two more defense attorneys in the street. One was killed, the other wounded.

Even then, nobody seemed to have any plans for keeping the rest of them alive. So Clark took on the job of petitioning the court for protection. He asked for ten guards per attorney (which actually meant three per shift) and transportation more secure than the rickety bus that brought the Iraqi attorneys into the Green Zone. After all, the judges and the prosecution team had squads of guards around at all times and got picked up at the door in armored cars.

The prosecutor said, I've got twenty weapons, automatic rifles. They can have them.

Negotiations dragged on for three months, and finally they were given handguns and permission to hire three people each--but no actual money.

In June, just as the trial was wrapping up, a squad of men kidnapped yet another defense attorney and left his body in the street. His name was Khamis al-Obeidi and he was the father of six children.

And the lawyers who survived didn't even have trial transcripts. How can you cite the record if you don't even have the record?

On the plane to Jordan, Ramsey Clark chews his Big Red gum and starts talking about Slobodan Milo_evi¥c and off we tumble down the rabbit hole. In the accepted version of this story, Milo_evi¥c is the preening Serb nationalist who loved ethnic cleansing and slaughtered thousands in Bosnia. In the world according to Ramsey Clark, he's a sad, misunderstood man who spent the last days of his life in a dank cell in a cold prison on a bleak northern sea. "They took a victim of the Balkanization of the Balkans and made a villain out of him," he says. "Madeleine Albright had a real chip on her shoulder about the Serbs."

It's the same when he talks about the famous genocide in Rwanda, when the Hutus slaughtered the Tutsis. In his version, the Tutsis were the colonial administrators for the Belgians and treated the Hutus like farm animals for a hundred years, plus there were Tutsi troops massed on the border ready to invade and a growing body of evidence that they shot down the plane carrying the Hutu leader. "Actually, more Hutus were killed than Tutsis," he says.

And that's how it is when he talks about Iraq, too, remembering how impressive the food-distribution system was during the sanctions, when every family registered with a local merchant of their choice for a reliable supply of staples like rice, grain, sugar, and baby formula. You would go into the stores and see all the packages neatly wrapped. Despite the obvious scarcities, there seemed to be basic trust in the system. "The people were getting what they were supposed to get," he says. "It wasn't enough, but they all recognized the circumstances. There was no popular dissatisfaction that I could detect anywhere."

Listening to Clark, your head swimming from all the sudden reversals, you might forget that the President's troops slaughtered Kurdish villages down to the last woman and child. If you press him on this point, he'll say that all wars are brutal and remind you about Hamburg and Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich. "We bombed the hell out of those cities. I saw them all." He has answers for all your questions. He defended the PLO in the Achille Lauro case because those specific terrorists were a PLO splinter group and Arafat rushed to the scene to help free the hostages and anyway, it wasn't fair on principle to sue the PLO. "Five Palestinians are killed for every one Israeli, but Palestinians can't sue Israel." He defended Lyndon LaRouche because the government came down on him like a ton of bricks and "it looked fishy." He still doesn't buy the evidence against Bernard Coard or Radovan Karad_i¥c, and he can explain why in his usual mixture of impressive detail and disturbing omissions.

But the truth of Ramsey Clark, when you get down to it, is even more extreme. "At some point along the way, I just stopped believing in punishment," he says. Somehow, unbelievably, a former attorney general of the United States has come to believe that our urge to cast out the sinner is our greatest folly. "Punishment just creates a desire for retaliation," he says. Of course there are a few crazies out there, "but I wouldn't punish. I would say deal with, and you have to deal with them in a way that shows you recognize their common humanity, that you're concerned about their dignity, that you want a good life for them. You talk and talk and talk, because you know that with each act of violence, you increase the possibility of violence. And you also try to know thyself--is there something that we're doing that is possibly causing this?"

He says that if you can see that there is no murderer, just a person who has committed a murder, then you'll understand why he's opposed to hunting down eighty-year-old Nazis and why he defends so many Arab terrorists. "After all," he says, "Menachem Begin was a murderer. He was part of the terrorist group that bombed the King David Hotel and killed ninety-one people. And he went on to become an important Israeli leader."

As the plane slips across the coast of Morocco, Clark falls into conversation with Curtis Doebbler, another international human-rights lawyer on the Saddam Hussein legal team. "I don't think that being a lawyer should be a requirement to become a Supreme Court justice," he says.

Doebbler seems surprised. "You're not worried that they'd do something radical if they don't know precedent?"

At the Vienna Airport, Doebbler goes to an Internet kiosk to check his e-mail and discovers that their meeting with Hussein has been canceled. There's no explanation. They decide to fly on to Jordan anyway. "It's like going into a black hole," he grumbles.

Waiting, they read the papers. The headlines are about plans to federalize Iraq, and Clark shakes his head in sad exasperation. "It'll just cut off the Sunnis even more."

At two in the morning, they arrive at Queen Alia International Airport, a regular modern facility except for some Moorish styling on the facade. A row of taxi drivers waits outside, and one of them lights up in recognition. "Clark?"

There's a moment's confusion. Clark thinks the taxi driver was sent to meet him, but it turns out the man just recognized him from the news. He turns to the other drivers and speaks a streak of Arabic studded with "Saddam" and suddenly all the taxi drivers break into smiles. This is the important American who is defending Saddam! Good man! Thumbs-up!

But there's no car to meet them. Doebbler kneels down and digs a new cell-phone chip out of his bag and sets up his phone for local calls.

Nobody answers.

Half an hour later, they decide to take a cab.

They stay in a modest hotel. In the morning, Clark nibbles on a piece of toast until a woman from the President's legal office comes to pick him up.

"Did they make better quarters for him?" Clark asks. "Does he have a bathroom?"

"I don't know," she says.

" 'Cause he didn't have a change of clothes. He didn't have a place to wash his face."

She doesn't know.

"We thought we were going to see him. We were told we'd see him."

"Tomorrow, yes."

"But we're not going to?"

"No. Because they don't want to make any logistics arrangements."

"Who doesn't?"

"It's better now to go," she says.

So he rides to the house of Saddam Hussein's oldest daughter and she has all the kids lined up for him, adorable kids. He's never seen a house with so many pictures of one person: Saddam with his daughters and Saddam with his sons and Saddam at official occasions with different beards and uniforms.

Then they get word from Baghdad. There will be a final hearing on Monday after all. And twenty days after that, the judgment will be announced.

Count that down--twenty days from Monday will be Sunday, November 5. Why would they announce a verdict on a Sunday?

"You can see what a game they're playing," Clark says. "If they do it on the Sunday before the election, it could easily make the Sunday news and the Monday-morning news."

So he calls the soldiers in charge of arranging meetings and asks to see the President before the hearing on Monday, and the soldiers say there is no hearing on Monday.

Back at the hotel, he's still exasperated. "You don't tell the lawyers when there's going to be a hearing? How do you defend someone?"

It's seven at night, and he hasn't eaten since the piece of toast in the morning.

He is kind to everyone. He is always patient. He never worries about sleep or food. He remembers the names of children. These things are important. You may hate him for defending Nazis or pity him for collaborating with so many fringy storefront Marxists, but there's an almost freakish integrity underneath it all, a flinty American purity that's straight out of Nathaniel Hawthorne or even Herman Melville. His whole point is to make common cause wherever he can, and he is going to follow that inner logic wherever it takes him.

Today it takes him to see Saddam Hussein, flying in the plane that winds down like Death's own corkscrew. After filling him in on the latest press conference and yesterday's editorial in The Guardian and the letter he wrote to the UN, Clark pauses. The case is over now. There's nothing else to say about that. Everyone in the room knows that the President will soon be sentenced to hang.

There's the possibility of filing a lawsuit against the United States, Clark tells Hussein. Because of the litigation over Guantánamo, the courts are hearing a lot of those right now.

But the President isn't interested. I don't want to, he says.

They serve dates. These are Jordanian dates, the President says. When you come to my house, you'll have Iraqi dates.

But the purpose is to defend rights, Clark says.

I'm sure it's as you say, the President answers, and I have no objection to others doing it. But I will never plead for my life.

Then it is time to go and Clark remembers to give the family report: Raghed is looking much better since her fainting spell, and the boys are filling out, too.

Yes, it's a wonderful family, the President says. Thank you for seeing them.

He goes back three weeks later for the sentencing and finds the President surprisingly relaxed, even laughing. He still won't file a lawsuit, says it will look like a plea for mercy and the important thing is for Iraqis to come together and repel the invaders--Allah's will be done.

As the sentencing begins, Clark submits a brief calling the trial a corruption of justice. The judge takes offense: "No, you are the mockery--get him out, out!"

"I've submitted an honest brief and you ought to take it," Clark answers.

"Get him out! Get him out! He's coming from America to insult the Iraqi people!"

As applause breaks out in the visitors' gallery, guards in black shirts remove him.

After the sentence, he talks to the President again on a closed-circuit TV and fills him in on the world reaction to the death verdict. Except for the UK, the Europeans are opposed to the sentence. "President Bush called it a 'major achievement,' " Clark says.

The President laughs.

Clark spends the night in his trailer under the shards of the government building listening to the occasional bomb and the medevac helicopters landing next door, each with its burden of blasted flesh. There is no way to stop any of this. He is seventy-eight years old. He has a persistent cough. He knows all the airports and their layouts. Some of his positions might seem insane to an ordinary man, but this is where his inner logic has led him. He is on a campaign to achieve world peace by forgiving the worst sinners in the world, one at a time, and he will never give up.